Monthly Archives: July 2009

I’ve been fol­low­ing the extraordin­ary case of Gary McKin­non for years now in a long range kind of way, but we are now in the final throes of his pro­longed fight against extra­di­tion to the USA, and he needs all the sup­port we can give him. The Daily Mail recently star­ted a cam­paign against his extra­di­tion: it’s not often I agree with the Wail, but I’m whole­heartedly in favour of this ini­ti­at­ive.

For those of you who have been liv­ing in a bunker for the last 7 years, Gary McKin­non is the self-con­fessed geek who went look­ing for evid­ence of UFOs and ETs on some of Amer­ica’s most secret com­puter sys­tems at the Pentagon and NASA.

And, when I say secret, obvi­ously I don’t mean in the sense of encryp­ted or pro­tec­ted. The Yanks obvi­ously did­n’t feel that their nation­al defence war­rants even curs­ory pro­tec­tion, as Gary did­n’t have to hack his way in past mul­tiple lay­ers of pro­tec­tion. Appar­ently the sys­tems did­n’t even have pass­words.

Gary, who suf­fers from Asper­ger­’s Syn­drome, is no super hack­er. Using a basic PC and a dial-up con­nec­tion in his bed­room, he man­aged to sneak a peek at the Pentagon com­puters, before kindly leav­ing a mes­sage that the US mil­it­ary might like to have a think about a little bit of basic inter­net secur­ity. Hardly the work of a malig­nant, inter­na­tion­al cyber-ter­ror­ist.

UK police invest­ig­ated Gary soon after this epis­ode, way back in 2002. All he faced, under the UK’s 1990 Com­puter Mis­use Act, would have been a bit of com­munity ser­vice if he’d been con­victed. Even that was moot, as the Crown Pro­sec­u­tion Ser­vice decided not to pro­sec­ute.

And that, as they say, should have been that.

How­ever, in 2003 the UK gov­ern­ment passed yet anoth­er dra­coni­an piece of law in response to the “war on ter­ror” — the Extra­di­tion Act. Under this invi­di­ous, one-sided law, the US author­it­ies can demand the extra­di­tion to Amer­ica of any Brit­ish cit­izen, without present­ing any evid­ence of the crime for which they are wanted. Need­less to say, this arrange­ment only works one way: if the Brits want to extra­dite a sus­pect from the US they still have to present prima facie evid­ence of a crime to an Amer­ic­an court. The Act also enshrines the ques­tion­able European arrest war­rant sys­tem in Brit­ish law.

So how on earth did the half-wits in Par­lia­ment come to pass such an awful law? Were they too busy tot­ting up their expense fiddles to notice that they were sign­ing away Brit­ish sov­er­eignty? This law means that it is easi­er for a US court to get a Brit in the dock than it is for them to get a US cit­izen from anoth­er state. In the lat­ter case, evid­ence is still also required.

Let’s get this straight. The UK author­it­ies decided not to pro­sec­ute in this coun­try. Even if they had, Gary would prob­ably have been sen­tenced to com­munity ser­vice. How­ever, if he is extra­dited, he will get up to 70 years in a max­im­um secur­ity pris­on in the US.

So a year after Gary’s bed­room hack, and after the CPS had decided there was no case to answer, the US author­it­ies deman­ded Gary’s extra­di­tion ret­ro­act­ively. The UK gov­ern­ment, rather than pro­tect­ing a Brit­ish cit­izen, basic­ally said “Yes, have him!”. Gary has been fight­ing the case ever since.

He has not been alone. Many people from across the polit­ic­al spec­trum see this uni­lat­er­al law as invi­di­ous. And the gov­ern­ment reckoned without his mum. Janis Sharp has fought vali­antly and indefatig­ably to pro­tect her son from this unjust extra­di­tion. She has lob­bied MPs, talked to news­pa­pers, gained the sup­port of many pub­lic and celebrity fig­ures. She even recently met the PM’s wife, Sarah Brown, who was reportedly in tears for Gary. Yet still the major­ity of the par­lia­ment­ary half-wits refuse to do any­thing.

In fact, it gets worse. Over the last few years many MPs have signed Early Day Motions sup­port­ing Gary’s fight against extra­di­tion. But in a recent debate in the House of Com­mons about the need to revise the pro­vi­sions of the Extra­di­tion Act, 74 of these MPs betrayed him and voted for the gov­ern­ment to keep the Act in place. Only 10 Labour MPs stuck to their guns and defied the party Whip. One Labour MP, Andrew MacKin­ley, will stand down at the next elec­tion in protest at this hypo­crisy.

This week is crunch time: on Fri­day a final judi­cial rul­ing will be made about the case. It was the last throw of the leg­al dice for Gary. If this fails, he will have to rely on polit­ic­al inter­ven­tion, which is pos­sible, to pre­vent his harm­ful, unjust and unne­ces­sary extra­di­tion to the USA. Please vis­it the Free Gary web­site and do all you can in sup­port.

About Annie

Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle on the spies' incompetence and crimes. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a media pundit, author, journalist, political campaigner, and PR consultant. More

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